Kayden’s presentation is called “Rewilding the Cultural Imagination to an Ecological Consciousness”
In The Great Derangement, writer Amitav Ghosh suggests our current climate crisis stems from a crisis of culture and cultural imagination. This lack of imagination furthers our disconnection from the natural world and justifies exploiting ecosystems. As depth psychologists and mythologists have discovered, consciousness deepens and heals by engaging the mythic imagination. Our refusal to embrace myths, what James Hillman calls our soul stories, keeps us in a state of denial with our archetypal reality which our current environmental situations reflect. The mythologies of Dionysus and Artemis in particular can contribute to a healing of this disconnection by way of rewilding and cultivating an ecological consciousness. Both Greek mythic figures offer an entry into the universal archetypes of wilderness, the communal cultivation of the vine and the wild feminine essential to reclaiming our relationship with nature and the wild. A Dionysian and Artemisian consciousness are explored as one way into the ecological consciousness and ecological thinking that is resisted in our current cultural expression. “Seeing through” the ensouled world in this way changes our relationship with the nonhuman and expands our own human ecology to include the world we live in.
This presentation is part of a special panel on Myth and Restoring Ecological Consciousness, sponsored by iRewild. Thank you, iRewild!
About Kayden
Kayden Baker-McInnis is a PhD candidate in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology working on an ecological dissertation focusing on the Greek figure Dionysus in relation to nature, body, and gender. She teaches language arts to school-aged students and offers adult myth classes. Her workshops include a humanities-based writing process engaging comparative mythology, cultural studies, and depth psychology in Salt Lake City.